Trump Vows Inflationary $5K Check to Every American if GOP Wins Midterms

President Trump might have violated federal law last night when he promised to send $5,000 to every American if the Republican Party keeps its majority in Congress.

Speaking at the midterm GOP convention in Dallas, Trump claimed that the United States was making so much money that the government, which is $40.1 trillion in debt and climbing, can afford to stroke a check for 5,000 big ones to every citizen with a pulse.

One problem: Doing so would cost more than $1.5 trillion. Another problem: Bribing voters is against the law.

Trump Dividend

In what the increasingly desperate president called a “Trump Dividend,” he apparently attempted to bribe voters.

“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in, in history, we’ve never had anything like what’s happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said:

Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders or like last year when I gave our great members of the military $1,776. Remember?

But Trump added a condition: Recipients must spend the booty in the United States.

“We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money,” Trump said:

We don’t want you going to China, to Germany. You got to spend the money in the United States of America. In other words, if the Republicans win, if you win, we might not win. The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs, they don’t take in money. All they know is poverty and how to ruin our country, but we’re making a fortune.

So if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend. We’ll call it the Trump dividend. Congratulations. Now all we have to do, now all we have to do is win.

The payment is a “dividend for American workers,” Vice President JD Vance told Fox News.

“We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because [Trump is] actually standing up to both foreign companies but also foreign countries who’ve been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” he continued.

Vance warned that undercutting the wages of American workers and shipping jobs overseas comes with “a big fat penalty when you try to bring that stuff back into” the country:

Those penalties have generated a lot of revenues. They’ve helped us pay down debt. What the president is just saying is … if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating.… I don’t think it’s a controversial idea. It’s actually [Trump] saying, we’re all working together, we’re all in the same team. And if we continue to create wealth, that wealth is going to go back to the American People.

The Problems

Trump’s pledge comes with some problems. For one thing, it isn’t likely to pan out, as The New York Times noted. Other such promissory notes have yet to materialize.

“At the start of his second term, President Trump promised a DOGE dividend, a pledge to take the money that Elon Musk’s team would cut from the federal budget and send it to the American people,” the Times observed:

Then Mr. Trump moved on to a “tariff refund,” a plan to use the money the government was collecting in import taxes to fund payments for the public.

Those ideas never panned out.

Second, again, the ballyhooed bazillions “we” are making have not slowed the rising national debt or annual budget deficit. The former is $40.14 trillion; the latter, $1.822 trillion. Assuming 317 million Americans, and assuming illegals and other legal residents don’t receive it, the $5,000 “Trump Dividend” will cost taxpayers $1.585 trillion.

Third, Trump might have trespassed the federal law that forbids bribing voters.

“Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote” can be fined and spend time in prison, says 18 U.S. Code 597.

“Being Italian and an attorney by trade, I know a thing or two about organized crime,” The Patriotic Blonde wrote on X: 

That’s not an incentive. 

That’s a bribe. …

He just committed a federal crime.

Critics

“I don’t know about you all, but frankly I’m insulted by the notion that my vote this November could be bought for 5k,” wrote outgoing GOP U.S. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky on X:

Not to mention the inflation this would cause. All things considered, I cannot in good conscience accept a penny less than 10k!

“$5,000 for the peasants will be in the mail after the election only if you vote Republican, along with those DOGE and tariff money checks” that never came through, former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X over a clip from Idiocracy.

Conservative podcaster Matt Walsh observed the obvious: Like Covid checks, the “Trump Dividend” will turbo-boost inflation. “Spending over a trillion dollars to randomly send everyone in the country a check for five grand, including people who are not even net taxpayers — which makes this, yes, welfare — is idiotic,” he wrote on X:

Sorry. We did that during covid and it didn’t help anything. Only made inflation worse. This is flagrant bribery. Which I could maybe stomach if the plan itself was at least sensible and coherent, but it isn’t.